


my heart bleeds red for you, endless and true

by scribblu



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky keeps taking in stray animals, Domestic Fluff, Implied Bottom Bucky, M/M, Not Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Compliant, POV Second Person, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, it's a short valentine's day fic okay don't expect too much, there is a puma, this is basically just Steve being really in love with Bucky
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 20:56:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17815382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblu/pseuds/scribblu
Summary: Sometimes, on morning like these, it’s overwhelming.Butter-soft skin beneath your fingertips, the warm, sleepy scent of him in your nose. The simple irritation of spitting his hair out of your mouth is perfect and precious for how often you’d imagined it before you remembered you could never have it again.You took this for granted, before. Never again.— a small slice of Steve’s Happily Ever After. Happy (belated) Valentine’s Day!





	my heart bleeds red for you, endless and true

**Author's Note:**

> fun facts!  
>   
> ☆ My sister has a cat named Frankie. He’s a pure black ball of fluffy sweetness.  
> ★ I used to have a dog named Daisy, short for Dazed and Confused.  
> ☆ These two facts are related to the fic. You’ll see.  
> ★ I have a cat named Cheeto Purrito. He likes to climb in the ceiling and ruin my life. I love him. This has nothing to do with anything.  
> ☆ The puma who was rescued from a contact zoo (in Russia?) and couldn’t be released into the wild is real. His name is Messi.  
> ★ The title was given to me by my best friend and sister, [Whimsy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whimsicality/pseuds/whimsicality), who also beta'd for me. It’s a poem she made up. Go love her.

 

Sometimes, on morning like these, it’s overwhelming.

Butter-soft skin beneath your fingertips, the warm, sleepy scent of him in your nose. The simple irritation of spitting his hair out of your mouth is perfect and precious for how often you’d imagined it before you remembered you could never have it again. The whisper of his breath. His steady heartbeat. You have him safe in your arms, tucked under your chin and against your chest, where you sometimes wish you could hide him away from the world and keep him close. With the sun peeking in through the burgundy curtains — that he chose, all by himself without any prodding, simply because he liked the intricate designs embroidered in gold — in a bedroom he calls _ours_ , curled around a miracle made flesh, your heart swells with how miraculously, overwhelmingly _perfect_ your life is.

You took this for granted, before. When you were smaller and you saw him everyday, you never imagined a time when he wouldn’t be there. And during the war, with your new big body and new bullies to fight, where he watched your six and marched by your side — until he couldn’t anymore. Until he was gone. So you followed him because that’s what you did, you and him. You always followed each other. Into fights, into dates, into war. It only made sense to follow him in death, too.

Never again.

Here, now, you squeeze him tighter, careful not to wake him. He grumbles anyway. You feel the vibrations against his back, hear the low, unhappy whine in the back of his throat. The gentle _whirr_ of his arm means he’s past the point of falling back asleep. He’s never been a morning person, and the decades and nightmares haven’t changed that; quite the opposite. You press a kiss into his hair, on the nape of his neck, between his shoulder blades. You pepper a few more across the unmarred curve of his right shoulder for the simple pleasure of doing so, just because you can.

“What time s’it?” he rasps quietly.

You mouth at his neck. “Little after ten.”

“And you’re still here?”

“Mhm.” You move up to the shell of his ear.

“So, what, you didn’t go on your run so you could watch me sleep? For four hours?”

You pause. “When you put it like _that_.”

He snorts. “You been humping me the whole time, too?”

You haven’t been paying attention, caught up in your head, but probably. Wouldn’t be the first time. “In my defense, you have a really nice ass.”

“Yeah?” His voice drops into a purr, all morning-soft and sweet, and he rolls his hips back into yours. “You wanna do somethin’ about it?”

Boy, do you ever. He knows as well as you do how much you want to. You _always_ want to. Even if the serum didn’t give you the stamina to go all day with a nonexistent refractory period, it’s not in you to deny him a thing.

You roll him over to claim a kiss, and he opens up so easily beneath you. “Ew,” he grumbles into your mouth, “you couldn’t’ve brushed your teeth?” but he lets you suck on his tongue anyway. Your hands move of their own volition, hungry for the feel of him. You had him last night, several times, but it will never be enough; you’ll always want more, greedy for him in a way that time and distance has only made worse. Every brush of his lips feels like a gift.

He tells you he wants you to go slow, so you go slowly, reining yourself in a little. It's a relief whenever he asks for anything, a spark of happiness in your chest and down your spine when he tells you what he wants. That he trusts you to tell you what he wants. Sometimes he's pushy and bossy for the hell of it, testing you even now, pushing at boundaries that aren't there, and you love it. If he wants slow and sweet, then that's what you'll give him. Gladly, eagerly.

You settle between his legs and his whole body rolls up against you, a rippling wave of flushed skin and muscle. But you must have made more noise than you thought; you've barely wrapped your hands around his powerful thighs when the excited scratch of claws on a hardwood floor reaches your ears. You have only moments to disengage and cover yourselves before massive paws knock the wind out of you, and a moment more before the other furballs climb up after.

“Hey, babies,” Bucky coos, saccharine the way he always talks to the animals. To you, he grumps, frustrated, “I keep telling you we should get carpets. They're gonna fuck up the floor, Steve, and I ain't replacing it again.”

You throw an arm over your eyes. “Yeah,” you manage, trying to will your dick into submission. You don't tell him he knew the hazards of rescuing a puma from a contact zoo that couldn't be released into the wild. You don't tell him he didn't actually replace the wooden slats in the floor last time; though the shit the two of you had to pull just to get the contractors out here in the first place would have made doing it yourself easier, what with the former Winter Soldier, the aforementioned puma, two giant, excitable dogs, and the fattest, fluffiest, most temperamental cat on the planet in residence — the whole Captain America thing was the _least_ of your problems — and how every single one of them watched the guys hired to help like the bunch of adorable, territorial, terrifying predators they are. You don't tell him that they do as they please because he spoils them rotten. You don't even tell him that getting carpets will only mean you'll be replacing those instead. All you say is, “we'll go check out some samples after breakfast, sweetheart,” because you love him, and you're tired of looking at the gouged wood anyway.

“We gotta take ‘em for a walk, too,” says the love of your life. Metal fingers scritch through your beard. You lower your arm and look over, and all of your sexual frustration instantly disappears at the look on his face. “Raincheck?”

You don't need clarification. You gather his warm, whirring hand and press your lips to the metal palm. “Whatever you want,” you say, because it's true. He could never want sex again and you'll be happy so long as you get to have him near. It's not as if you don't have perfectly working hands. “You want bacon? I'm feeling bacon, today.”

He smiles. There isn't a thing you wouldn't do to keep him happy, and safe, and looking at you like that. “Yeah, sure. Bacon's fine.”

 

☆ 

  
★

 

It wasn’t easy, in the beginning.

Bucky remembered bits and pieces, small snatches of time out of order. You didn’t want to force anything on him, even if every bit of you ached with your history together. All that ever mattered was to have him near, to have him with you — all that mattered was that he remembered you enough to come home.

But it was difficult. He rarely spoke, barely remembered to eat. You could hear his nightmares, sometimes, but he kept his room locked and — as much as it pained you not to rush in there and hold him — you would not betray his trust. He got stuck in his head more often than not, and didn’t leave his room if he knew you could see him. Sometimes he was grumpy. Resentful. Other times, he’d hover around the edges of whichever room you were in, watching from behind his curtain of hair. Your palms itched to touch him, but that wasn’t your call to make. It was agony to have him so close and still so far. You wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

And then, one day, you came home after forcing yourself to leave for a while, knowing your hovering did little more than annoy him, only to find him loosely curled under a sunbeam, long lashes casting endless shadows on his pale cheeks. His short sleeves had ridden up, revealing his mismatched arms in all their glory. You were mesmerized. You called upon every ounce of stealth SHIELD and Natasha taught you to carefully place the coffee and sandwich you’d brought him by his head, and retreated to the couch to pretend to read. Your fingers itched to draw him, but you knew better. _Later_ , you promised yourself.

It marked a shift. After Bucky woke up, startled to find you there hours later, something must have clicked inside of him. He started to speak a little more, sometimes whole sentences. He made eye contact — and it was hard for him, but you could see him try. He even laughed once, a small huff of air you treasured, even if it was at your expense. Lord knows you’ve made a fool out of yourself over this man before, and would gladly do so again.

When you went to his room one night after he came screaming into consciousness, the door was unlocked.

“There was a saying,” he told you that night, his voice hoarse. He sipped at the water you gave him as he struggled to find the words. “I don’t know if you — but ma told us if you save a life, you save a whole world. Think about that. I snuffed out galaxies long before I fell, Stevie. Ain’t nothin’ but blood and stardust on my hands.”

You believed him. Bucky had always seemed ethereal to you. Strong and beautiful and so, so brave. And you knew he was trying to tell you what a monster he thought he was, trying to convince you there was nothing worth fighting for, but all you could think about was how he looked otherworldly in the moonlight, his eyes glowing a soft silver, and how unbelievably brave he was, even then — even now — and how all you wanted to do was wrap yourself around him until all that stardust bled into you and you could share the burdens of his broken memory.

The courts had found Bucky to be a victim — the longest serving POW in history — not a villain, but he still had trouble seeing it.

He used to give you all kinds of shit for being stubborn as hell, sighing at you with equal parts exasperation and fondness. Maybe he’d forgotten that, too. You swore you would remind him, then. Nothing, _nothing_ would take him away from you again.

 

☆ 

  
★

 

While you understand the initial knee-jerk reaction, walking the animals never fails to amuse you.

Your neighbors are used to you by now, for the most part. Most of them have been kind enough to give you space and privacy, especially after Bucky's trial. But it's human nature to be alarmed when you see a wild animal walking down the street, nevermind a puma. Nevermind that you keep her on a specialized harness for her walks, or that Kitty is just a giant, spoiled house cat who worships the ground Bucky walks on.

It's Mephistopheles you have to keep your eye on. Phella may be a massive ball of fur with a squished-in face that seems to shed all year round, but Bucky found her as a small, shaking kitten in a dumpster behind his favorite bodega, and now Her Majesty will claw your face off if she deigns to acknowledge your presence at all. She's the one who catches all the rodents around the house, and she has no qualms about keeping the other three in line. She's oddly cute — you know, for a miniature vicious apex predator with delusions of grandeur — but you will never admit it. Only Bucky is allowed to collar and leash her; you're lucky if she lets you near her food bowl.

Bucky's always had a way with small, angry things. You're not surprised.

The dogs, however, are much easier to handle, and friendlier, but they’re still big dogs. They're barely a year old, more overgrown puppies than anything else. The shelter you adopted them from said they were rescued together, though they're obviously not from the same litter; Daisy is a orangey-white mottled husky mix who’s blind in one eye, and Frankie’s a pitbull with a chunk missing out of her hind leg. Bred to fight, you were told, with behavioral problems, and bound to be as huge as their parents were. And they’re _big_ , as promised, and only going to get bigger, but they’re also the sweetest pups in the world who won’t sleep without each other and their stuffed animals. They both have the biggest blue eyes and pink noses, and they didn’t take to strangers, yet they padded right up to Bucky’s metal hand and sniffed him through the bars of their cage. If Bucky hadn’t taken them home, you would have.

All four of them, and you, stand around Bucky protectively when you go on these walks. Sometimes Phella will hop on his shoulders and curl around Bucky's neck like furry boa. Very rarely will she hop on yours, usually when you've got Bucky tucked in tight against you and his anxiety flares up. You and that cat don't always see eye to eye, but you both love Bucky with every ounce of your being — from the cockles of your ornery hearts. Today, she appears to be napping on Frankie, who takes her job as a glorified pillow with a wag of her curly, whipcord tail. Daisy watches jealously and tries to lay on Kitty, who gamely pads a few steps with the husky draped sideways over her back, before Daisy gets bored and starts chasing light beams instead.

So, yeah, you’re aware the six of you paint a strange picture. After the Chitauri, any anonymity you had went flying out the window, and the social media storm Bucky’s trial invoked means both of you are instantly recognizable to the public at large. Basic disguises work most times when you’re alone, though Bucky is much better at hiding in plain sight. Together, he doesn’t even try, so you don’t, either. Any disguise is useless the second you bring Kitty with you, anyway; she has more followers on Twitter than you and Bucky _combined_.

It’s a little chilly out, so you bundle him up in scarves and earmuffs and the dark, high-collared peacoat you think makes him look delectable. He puts his foot down on the mittens and takes your gloves in rebellion, so you wear the pawprint mittens Natasha knitted for him instead. He does his own fussing when you try to walk out the door in only a sweater, bundling you up so you’re a matching pair. When you do, finally, lockup and leave the house, he’s got the leashes wrapped around one arm while the other wraps around your waist, all of him tucked against your side.

It is a marvel, still, to be able to do this. To have this publicly, freely, without shame or worry or care. You can hold his hand and you can play with his hair. You can sling your arm around him in an echo of the way he’d done so with you a lifetime ago, except you can pull him closer, now, and press a kiss to his temple, his cheek, his lips, and there’s not a soul that can tell you otherwise.

People can stop and stare all they want, but with Bucky plastered against you beneath the clear blue sky, warm and happy and _safe_ , none of it can touch you.

The game plan for today is simple: you and Bucky will go to the hardware store, where you’ll then split up. Bucky will go on to the park with the animals while you browse the carpets, taking samples and as many pictures as your phone will allow. You’ll grab a second breakfast — brunch, rather — and meet them at the park for a small picnic before heading home.

You may be heralded as a master tactician in the war, but Bucky was, too. And he likes plans. He likes making lists. You think it has something to do with structure and control, but you try your best not to overanalyze. He even drew this little map on the back of a napkin while you fried bacon, and you want to laminate it when you get home.

There’s old news footage of you and your team running on one of the huge advertisement screens as you walk by. It wasn’t a great mission, you remember, but you’d saved as many as you could. More robots because they seem to be both humanity’s greatest achievement and its biggest mistake — your love-hate relationship with technology can attest to that. Yours wasn’t the only suit that got torn up in the fighting, but, for some reason, the camera keeps zooming in on your bare stomach, clenched mid-battle as you were. You can feel your ears burning as more and more people start watching what’s become a giant showcase of your abs, completely undermining the commentary in the background.

“God bless America,” Bucky says with his fish-hook smile, staring up at the screen, and you snort to hide how much that lures you in like nothing else. It's never failed to curl your lips in turn, his crooked grin that reminds you of sharks and sin and smoky rooms you couldn't catch your breath in.

It was so much easier to hide your breathlessness when you were boys and air was a fair weather friend. You don't have an excuse for the way your face catches fire and your heart stutters, the ache in your chest where the scar of his name carved itself a place inside you so long ago.

But you don’t have to hide it anymore.

“Shut it, you,” you grumble, and pull him away from the small, gathering crowd. Kitty's already starting to garner attention, given the wide berth passerbys keep giving her. You're pretty sure this is going to end up online.

Times are different. That's what everyone keeps telling you. People can do this, they say, people can do that, people can do all these things they couldn't in your time, grandpa.

But you remember people doing all those things, before. None of it is new. It’s as if they’ve forgotten the war you fought. Racist assholes existed back then, too, hence the aforementioned war. Women fought. Queer people existed. Take away the flashy tech, the pretty terms, the constantly evolving slang that makes your head spin, and it's not so different. Bullies take different forms, have different names, but they’re still bullies; the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Progress, you think, is slow, but welcome all the same. That was true then, too.

You wonder what it is about you that makes people think concepts like _human rights_ and _freedom_ and _loving another man_ are completely foreign to you. What is it about you, you wonder, that makes them assume the careful articulation with which you speak isn't the cultivated image leftover from your dancing monkey act. Or that you've never known desire — when you've lived your whole life choking on all the things you wanted and could never, ever have — or a love you would have burned the world to find again. That you very nearly _did_ burn the world for before you found him again. Lord knows you burned enough bridges along the way.

(You don’t regret it. You’d do it all over again if it meant getting him back, keeping him safe. That doesn’t mean you don’t regret hurting people. You’ve never enjoyed hurting people. But you were made for war long before the serum, and they made their choices as surely as you made yours. It was the right choice, even if it didn’t feel like a choice at all.)

It’s as if they have forgotten that love existed back then, too. Want, and lust, and hunger. You were born poor and sick, and you grew poorer and sicker no matter how hard you fought against it. This is a secret to absolutely no one; you've read some of the history books. Of course you know what it is to want. All you’ve ever done is want.

(And on the other side of that coin, the clench in your belly that spoke of a different hunger, was Bucky. You find it ludicrous that anyone who's seen the way you know you look at him — the way you've been trying to hide the way you know you've looked at him your whole damn life — can ever think you don't know what it is to want.)

Attitudes aren't as progressive as your teammates would have you believe; contrary to popular assumptions, you've had a somewhat tenuous grasp on social media for a while now. You know what people think — _still_ think — about people who are different. Born different, live different, love different. And you know, not so deep down, why people keep expecting you to be scandalized by things like gay pride parades or black presidents, and are surprised when you give a shark-toothed grin of your own and say, “about fuckin’ time.” It’s not that they think you’re innocent and naive. Or, at least, not _just_ that they think you’re innocent and naive. People have been projecting their image onto you since you stumbled out of that tube.

Progress is slow, but welcome. And none of it is new.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some of the better things about living in the twenty-first century. Cures for diseases, the convenience of technology, the marvel of social media and reaching millions of people with a few strokes of a keyboard. Medicine and technology have come so far, people’s views even farther. You can vaccinate your children so they don’t grow up with the fears your mother had for you, and you can kiss on your best guy in the middle of Central Park without giving a single fuck who sees you.

They used to throw people with desires like yours in jail, or in asylums. They would do worse things if they caught you in the streets. Brooklyn was one of the few places where inclinations like yours were more open than most, but it was far from safe. Even still, you saw. You knew. Bucky dragged you everywhere with him, fucking _everywhere_ , and he was a butterfly; he liked to try new things, learn new things, meet new people, and he wanted to share it all with you — happily, easily, sometimes frustratingly so. And, _Christ_ , he was beautiful. Watching him flit and flirt and flutter around, all easy laughter and charm, was to witness gravity in motion, helpless little rocks orbiting a star.

( _What’re you talkin’ ‘bout,_ he’d slurred against your neck, his body warm and loose against yours, your tongue looser than you thought after a single beer as you savored the slow stumble home, _you’re the star of this show, sunshine.)_

But that is a private memory. There was a golden window where Bucky got a special kind of soused. It brought out the sap in him, made him dangerously affectionate, and threw his impulse control out the window; since he was approximately eighty-five percent of _your_ impulse control, it was a coin’s toss as to whether or not you two would make it home with or without incident. You were always careful to watch your intake whenever you noticed him knocking them back the way he did on nights like those.

Quietly, you relished taking care of him for a change. He made it so easy, all sweet and pliant and eager to please. Careful, always, to never push, never hurt you, especially when he had any booze in him. He would either wake up miserable and sick, or softly kissing up on you with the taste of stale morning on his tongue, but he rarely remembered any of the honeyed words he’d gently tuck into your ears, your skin, your hair the night before.

“You okay?” Bucky asks out of nowhere, his grip tightening in the back of your coat.

“Huh?” You wrench your wayward thoughts back into the present. “Yeah, no, I’m fine, baby.” You press a kiss into his hair and marvel anew, tugging him further under your arm. Phella gives a weird meowing chirp that sounds more like a bark, and Frankie _yips_ in kind. “Just thinking.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.”

You smile. “Jerk.”

Bucky — who can remember every kill, but can’t remember what his mother looked like — will never recover these memories. Your eidetic memory isn’t perfect, either. There are some things before the ice, before the serum, even you have trouble remembering clearly. You’re okay with that.

It’s enough that you got to live them.


End file.
